The bigger man stared at me blankly for a moment, then shook his head and got busy pulling on his ski cap. He’d come out in soft clothes, easy to tear if he had to shapeshift. Skateboard sneakers, loose gym pants, a dark crewneck sweater.
“What?” I said.
“I was being sarcastic, dude.”
“I am not a ‘dude’,” I replied. “And I’m in too much pain to be able to tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. As it stands, it took me years to understand that people didn’t mean they thought something actually resembled a piece of cake.”
“Is this a second language thing?” He arched a thick eyebrow, slinging a bandoleer over his shoulder. The tools were spaced a few inches apart, and muffled with bunches of fabric staplegunned to the nylon band. Zane, for all his well-spoken politeness, was as much a professional thief as I was.
“No. It’s a ‘people don’t say what they actually mean’ thing.” I had my own toolkit, a duffle bag the right size for me to wear like a backpack when required. I opened the door, slinging the bag over one shoulder. “Here’s a good example—when people say ‘what’s up?’ I mean... is that a philosophical question? A literal inquiry? People would ask me ‘what’s up?’, and I thought I was supposed to guess the correct answer. ‘Oh, well, the ceiling is ‘up’. The sky is ‘up’. Why the hell are you asking me this? Am I living in a Doctor Seuss book?’”
“Huh.” Zane followed me out onto the street while I held the door for Binah. I was dressed like a utility worker in dark blue coveralls. Together, we looked like the kind of guys who could very well be here to fix a failing mortuary fridge late at night. Not exactly a foolproof disguise, but the best we had on such short notice.
“It’s worse when people are trying to make friends with you,” I continued, holding still while my familiar leapt to my shoulder. “Like, say you come up to me while I’m reading the news at the table in the morning, and you ask me: ‘What are you reading?’ My default response is to tell you the truth. The New York Times, The Washington Post, whatever. But that’s not what you’re asking. What you’re actually asking is: ‘Hey Alexi, tell me what interests you in the newspaper so we can chat about it.’ And if I don’t remember that you’re speaking code, it comes off as cold and disinterested, even though it’s the truth.”
Zane nodded slowly, sucking his lip under his top teeth. “You know, I never thought of it that way.”
It’d been Vassily who’d explained that particular thorny chestnut to me. My throat twinged. “People say that a lot about the way I see things.”
The pair of us fell silent as we came into range and faded into the shadows. The first thing we did was scope the front yard. We were within twenty feet of the door when the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood on end, prickling with every quiet step. Magic thrummed out across the yard… power with an oddly familiar resonance, like the work of a street artist I’d seen over and over, but didn’t know the name of.
“Wait a second,” I whispered aloud to Zane, then turned my voice inward to Kutkha. “Kutkha, what the hell is that?”
“A ward,” he replied, without a trace of mockery. “A very powerful ward.”
“This is by the same person who did up Semyon’s apartment. I’m sure of it.” Astounded, I crouched down in the shrubbery, reaching out toward the core of energy that howled from the center of the door. It was a different type of ward than the one that Semyon had received to protect himself. That particular ward that had made him so confident that instead of fleeing the city once he learned there was a hit on him, he’d run to his apartment in Manhattan. As I mapped it out—it was so complex that it looked more like a vortex than a geometric figure—I realized something else. I had run into this artist multiple times.
Long ago, I fought and eventually killed a rival spook: an Israeli mage, Eric Kovacs. Kovacs had been a curse specialist, a Hexer. He’d had a strong, hard-to-sense ward on his apartment window. I’d fired a round from a sniper rifle right into it, and the glass hadn’t even cracked. I hadn’t made the connection at Semyon’s house, but thinking back, I was sure that it was the same mage. This ward was less aggressive, but just as advanced as both the previous ones I’d encountered. It was the kind of magic that could persist for hundreds of years, the product of intense formal training given to a prodigy. Six years ago, I’d failed to bust Kovacs’ protection. I’d only busted Semyon’s because I had the Wardbreaker and a human sacrifice ready to go. I was all out of sacrifices, and if I used the Wardbreaker, I might as well paint 'ALEXI WAS HERE' on the wall in bright orange letters. I didn’t really believe Keen, but I wasn’t willing to take the risk now that I was on his radar.
I opened my eyes and exhaled thinly. Kovacs had been working for the Manellis, though that was some years ago. Semyon was an FBI informant. If Semyon had answered to Agent Keen... then it had to be a member of the Vigiles who’d made these wards. Right?
“Alexi? What is it?” Zane whispered. He was much larger than me, and in the darkness of the garden, he looked like a hunched gargoyle.
“They have a snitch ward on the place.” I shelved the mystery for the time being. I’d have to think on it later. “An alarm. We can’t get in here. If it’s all the way through the house, we’re out of luck. Let's see what we find behind the building. It's a funeral home; they'll have a garage where they deliver the bodies.”
The business of funeral homes was the business of discretion. Every one of them needed a staging area where fresh cadavers were delivered before embalming and display, preferably without anybody on the street knowing what they were transporting in and out of the building. We hopped the fence and stealthed around the corner through the garden, where we found a continuation of the spiked fence with a solid gate with a sign. 'Property of McKinnon Funeral Home: Authorized Personnel Only.'
"Here we go…" I whispered, going to a knee. I peered through the gap between the fence line and the start of the gate. As I did, I saw something stir: A leg, then a hand flexing on the barrel of a long assault rifle that gleamed with the same ghostly scarlet glow as the guns we’d taken from the scrapyard. I watched and waited as a heavily armed, heavily armored man strolled past and out of sight. What little I glimpsed was military-grade gear.
I grunted, letting the cat down to the ground. “I’m fairly sure those are Men in Black. Terrible amount of security for a funeral home.”
“How’re we going to get in, then?”
I thought for a moment. “Let’s go around further, on the street. There might be a way in around the other side. If there’s not, we’re going to have to leave it at scouting and call it good until we have more firepower.”
He gave me the thumbs up, and we made our way back out and into the street, careful not to be seen through the huge windows on the front of the house. We went around the corner of the block to see what we could see. On this side, the fence was tall and solid, an industrial fence with an electronic sliding door. The house beside it was an old standalone clapboard house with peeling paint. Small, narrow, with a tiny front yard, a chain-link fence and a narrow driveway that ran all the way to the backyard. An eight-foot wooden fence separated the house from the funeral home’s courtyard. The fence was bare for most of the way down, but the section facing the backyard was topped with razor wire.
“Jeez,” Zane hissed. “This place is banged up like Fort Knox.”
“It’s do-able. I’ll send Binah ahead.” I crouched down, motioning to Binah with my hand.
“You can do that?”
“We’ll find out.”
Binah had been ghosting us with eerie willingness, and obediently padded up when I made the chin-scritch motion to her. Instinct told me I needed to touch her with bare skin, not gloves, so I pulled them off and bent over her, caressing her head and flanks, rubbing her ears, pressing my mouth to the top of her sleek head. With little effort, I felt it—the spark of consciousness, the connection between magus and familiar. A familiar, Kutkha had told me, was the incarna
tion of your soul in a non-human form. I was about to find out how deep that connection ran.
I drew a breath, let it out, and recessed into my core: The temple where I meditated. The temple is what is commonly known as a thoughtform, a visual interface for my psyche. In my old way of looking at magic, the temple was an astral niche shaped by my will out of Yesod, the next-densest layer of reality that was intermeshed with Malkuth, the material or earthly reality. As my understanding of magic had become more flexible and fluid, so had the thoughtform. After a few minutes, I was there.
The entry to the temple was down a short flight of sandstone steps, and in through a metal door that opened into a huge bell-shaped chamber. The immersion was so complete that I heard the marble floor ring out beneath my shoes. I smelled salt water, and here and there, traces of honeysuckle drifting on the cold air. The temple was faced in black granite, with a smooth polished ebony floor set with a plain, unbroken silver ring. The entry point was in the east; to the south was a nasty creeping lichen that was eating its way through the stone and trying to burrow through it. That was how my imagination visualized the Yen. It was much more entrenched than I remembered it… like mold that was working its way through a loaf of bread. For time being, it was placated by the fight at Strange Kitty.
With one eye on the Yen, I began to search with my imagination for the iconic entryway of felines everywhere: a cat flap. When I found it, I crouched down and looked inside. There was a tunnel beyond: the psychic link between me and Binah.
“Will she understand if I ask her to look for an entry large enough for a person?” I turned to look over my shoulder, knowing Kutkha would be there.
My Neshamah sat on a gilded silver perch on the other side of the chamber, his plumage simmering off into the air like an indigo heat haze. Kutkha was in his usual shape, that of a peacock-sized raven with a long sweeping tail. His tenebrous body was the color of the night sky, and his burning, brilliant magnesium eyes were currently closed while he stood on one leg, grooming the feathers of his head with the other foot. “Yes, my Ruach. I will make it so.”
I focused on what we needed her to do, imagining the request as a mouse cupped in my hands. When I could feel its heart thrumming against my palms, I released it through the image of the cat flap and watched it scurry away before I stepped back out of meditation. I immediately had the odd sensation of looking back at myself from the ground. Somehow, I could both see Binah, and see Binah watching me. It was as confusing as it sounded.
“Okay, girl,” I whispered. “Go find us a door.”
Binah’s ears pinned as she slunk off into the night like a ribbon of smoke. My head throbbed. I had to close my eyes, too dizzy to move as a fraction of my awareness left with her.
The cat made a beeline for the standalone house, hopping the front fence into the yard. She sauntered down the path with her tail held high, then scaled the tall wooden fence adjacent to the small compound where the guards waited. Through her eyes, I was able to see inside. It was nothing but a square of bare concrete and a couple of marked parking spaces, both empty. There were two guards, both of them dressed like SWAT on steroids. They were carrying rifles that spat magic in Binah’s vision, sucking the air toward them. There were sigil patches on the guard’s uniforms that did the same thing. One of them glanced at Binah as she strolled along the edge of the fence, but he paid no more mind than that.
Binah leapt lightly from the fence to the roof the garage, sniffing at the corrugated iron sheeting. I breathed deeply and evenly, waiting until she shimmied down the other side. There was a tiny backyard there, mossy and neglected, that was framed by the neighbor’s fence line on one side, the back of the garage on the other, the rowhouse, and the wall separating it from the next rowhouse over. Binah wound through chipped lace metal tables and dead pot plants to a pair of double steel doors set into the ground at an angle. They were chained together by a thick, rusted chain and padlock. The basement entry.
"Clever girl," I murmured, squatting back on my heels. I rubbed my eyes. "Alright. There's a way in. Cougars are good jumpers, aren’t they?"
“Yeah.”
“Boost me up. I’ll cut the wire and get over. Then you follow in cougar form.”
Zane grimaced.
I eyed him back. “What?”
“Nothing. Guess that’s how we’re going to have to do it.” He rubbed a hand over the reddish fuzz on his head. “Let’s go.”
We followed Binah’s trail down the driveway. The people who lived in this house had put heavy drapes on their windows, the better to block out the sight of hearses pulling in and out of the funeral home. We crept to the gate leading into their backyard, where I crouched to pick the lock, wincing as I jarred the injured side of my ass. When the lock popped, I got a small can of WD-40 and gently spritzed the hinges and latch before opening the gate and crab crawling inside.
There was always an odd sensation of pressure when you passed a physical barrier like this one, the Will of the residents who had made this their home. It rippled over my skin all the way to the fence. “Okay. And for the love of GOD, please boost me up with the right leg.”
“Why?”
“That pizdets[14] Vigiles sniper took me down with a rhino dart, is why.” I got my wire snips ready, and waited for him to crouch and lace his hands. When he did, I stepped up. He lifted me like I weighed nothing, and I was weirdly conscious of how close his face was to the backs of my legs as I got to work on the wire, snipping out a wide section.
I pushed the wire into the funeral home’s yard, resolved myself to the agony that was about to follow, and pulled myself up and over as quietly as I was able, which made it sound like a fat raccoon was hauling a pizza box over the fence. I dropped down and stumbled to one knee as my glute quivered and then gave out on me, throbbing painfully. Binah watched me from beside the double doors like a statue of Bast, her tail wrapped around her feet. I’d always figured that cats spent a lot of time judging their owners, but now I had an empathic link to one, I knew for certain that they did.
Abruptly Binah’s eyes widened, and her ears flattened to her skull. She scrambled away under one of the patio tables as a huge feline shadow fell over the backyard. I turned to see a puma the size of a pony balancing gracefully on the edge of the fence before he bounded down to join us in the yard. He was carrying a tied bundle of clothes in his mouth and was still wearing the bandolier.
“Zane?” I said, warily.
The big cat looked up at me wildly, gray-green eyes shining in the dim light reflected off the clouds. After a tense standoff, the puma dropped the bundle, licked his chops, then yawned. He sat down on his haunches.
I nodded, and went to the double doors. They were warded, but not with anything I couldn’t deal with using the arcane tools I’d brought with me. A bit of sulfur, a few muttered words, and a lock pick, and the lock was off. I greased everything and gently pulled the chain from around the handles, laying it aside, then looked over at Zane. “Okay. Are you changing back?”
The puma flattened his ears, and motioned to the door with a paw. Not sure what he wanted, I squinted. This time, he pointed at me, then the door.
“Right.” Only slightly less confused, I opened the door and slid down into darkness.
Chapter 19
The doors led to a flight of stairs with a dead end at the bottom. The door to the basement was boarded up, which explained the lack of wards. I got a crowbar and tested the strength of the nails. They were old and rusted in, but after several minutes work and some WD-40, I was able to crack open a big enough hole to climb through. A wave of humid, bad-smelling air roiled from the dark space beyond. It wasn’t the acrid, violet oily-sweet stench of DOG. It was... cold. Gray. Toxic, in the way that mineral tailings or chemical slag was toxic. A nasty metallic taste filled my mouth as I slipped inside.
“Jesus Christ,” Zane hissed from the stairwell. “What are they keeping in there?”
“Smells like acid. Batteries, maybe.” I swit
ched the penlight for a larger flashlight, holding my knife in my other hand. The beam of light revealed rows of steel shelves filled with coffins wrapped in plastic. Black coffins, rounded coffins, baby coffins. They were stacked from floor to ceiling in rows. It was a big room. “What was the matter back there?”
“I don’t like changing when people are around.”
“Why? It doesn’t bother me in the slightest.”
“That’s not the point.”
Which reminded me. There were things I’d wanted to ask him back in the house, but hadn’t been able to. Considering anyone who might overhear was already dead, this coffin-filled basement was as good a place as any to humiliate myself.
I drew a deep breath, and turned back to look at him. “On a semi-related note, Zane, I needed to ask you something.”
“Like?” He regarded me suspiciously.
It was a simple question, but I had to deliberate on the words. I shifted my weight, frowning as I tried to make them come out, and couldn’t on the first couple of tries. “How... exactly...?”
He arched an eyebrow.
“How can, uh... I mean, how did you know you were gay?” I looked up at him, brow furrowed. “I-I mean, I don’t mean to put you on the spot or anything, but...”
Zane looked down at me in growing disbelief. “Rex. We are in the middle of a goddamn break-in.”
“And…?”
He rubbed his face. “We’re in a funeral home. I smell dead people, okay?”
“Well, why do you think I’m asking you here?” I hissed. “You think I want anyone listening to this?”
Zane screwed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay, look. Is there a point to you asking, or are you just, like, curious? Or...?”
I wanted to tell him what had happened with Angkor, then Christopher. I wanted to… but the words stoppered up again. “Look. Just answer the damn question, and we can move on. How did you know you were gay?”
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